Jenee ready to share her stories again

Singer-songwriter’s ‘soultronicarock’ vibe owes debt to soft rock

In 2009, St. Louis singer-songwriter Teresa Jenee took her hometown by storm with her first fulllength disc The Ecklectic, an original blend of styles the artist dubbed “soultronicarock;” think Lauryn Hill or Erykah Badu, and that just scratches the surface.

Jenee, who performs Friday at the Rumba Room as part of the online community NeoSoulsville’s SouLove series, followed up by winning best R&B artist in a local poll two years straight. But no new music was forthcoming until this year, when she decided to hit fans with a one-two punch of releases.

“I think I wanted to let people know I was still here. I hadn’t come out with a project in three years and I needed to say something at that point,” says Jenee, who planned to follow up the celebratory July release The Electric Yellow with a darker, more intimate record, Dream Come True.

“I didn’t want to go out there initially with that album ( Dream Come True). It’s kind of like meeting somebody for the first time and telling them your cat died and all this depressing stuff about your personal life. I didn’t want to go there. I felt like this a reintroduction.”

Jenee’s plan was thrown out the window, however, when, shortly after The Electric Yellow came out, her father died of pancreatic cancer.

“My father was part of the dark stuff (at the center of Dream Come True) and then he passes away and I come out with this happy, happy project,” says Jenee of the disconnect she felt at the time. “I felt I needed to rewrite Dream Come True and push that album back, because now I have my father that I have to discuss and I want time to heal and time to go into that and get my thoughts together before I write these songs about him.”

A guitar player and preacher in St. Louis’ Walnut Park neighborhood, Jenee’s father, along with her choir director mother, was a prime shaper of the unique blend of influences that inform their daughter’s music. To protect their kids from the rough streets outside, the Jenees kept a strict house where the radio stations that played the soul, R&B, and rap to which Teresa’s peers were listening were forbidden. Instead, before she and her sister went to bed, Teresa’s mother would come into their room and set the radio to the local classic rock station, which would serenade them to sleep with David Bowie, Elton John and Queen.

“It vastly affects my ballad writing to this day,” Jenee says. “The way songs are structured in soft rock is a lot how I

Teresa Jenee admits she’s cautious about baring her soul in lyrics: “It’s kind of like meeting someone for the first time and telling them your cat died and all this depressing stuff.”